Dangerous Ethnography

I. Three Vignettes 1. It was 1988, my first year teaching at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill. My advisor, Dwight Conquergood, had flown in from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, to give final approval of what I hoped would be the last draft of my dissertation. The dissertation needed to be completed within a few weeks for me to be awarded the Ph.D. that year and to be promoted from lecturer to assistant professor at UNC (this was the agreement UNC mandated on my hire). While Dwight was managing all-nighters proofing dissertation chapters at my kitchen table and I was running back and forth between my study and the kitchen giving him chapter after revised chapter, hot off the computer, one night we took a break from the intensity of dissertation deadline madness and starting talking about the nature of fieldwork and the notion of a “dangerous ethnography.”.